Online Archive Of The American Revenuer Now Open!

As communicated in the last issue of The American Revenuer, an initiative is now underway for making back issues available online. Bob Hohertz, Chris Steenerson, and I have been coordinating in this effort.

The most recent 5 years of TAR issues will always be restricted to American Revenue Association members, but isses prior to that point will be available to the general public.

The members-only issues will be hosted on the ARA website and require a membership login to access. The public archive is hosted on my server (although the appearance is such as to integrate with the main ARA website) and no login is required to read the public TAR issues.

Chris Steenerson has been doing the raw scanning work thus far, and I'm doing the image cleanup and optimization, OCR conversion, and online setup.

In addition to individual issues being searchable, I have installed a localized search engine that will allow you to do keyword searches across the entire archive. Any time I upload a new year's worth of issues, I simply spider the additional content and it is immediately added to the search database; no waiting for Google. :)

The archive is in its initial stages, with years 1970-1977 currently available and 1978-80 hopefully up by next week. Chris will be working on scanning issues backwards into the 1960s and earlier, and I will be scanning the material from the 1980s and newer. Over the next several months we hope to expand the archive's coverage in both directions and ultimately make it as complete as possible.

Basic TAR issues are included, along with certain selected informational supplements. Auction supplements that are external to TAR and yearbooks will not be included.

http://www.revenue-collector.com/tararchive

Vive le digital revolucion! ;)

Thanks for posting. Even though I'm not really a revenue stamp collector, it makes for interesting reading.

In fact, here's one example I took from one of many articles. Anyone recall this stamp before? (Obviously printed in the publication before the advent of today's digital photography.):



For an answer, checkout the January 1972 edition of The American Revenuer publication (pages 13-14).

Yeah, the image quality of the earlier issues is very primitive, and there's virtually nothing that can be done in the scanning process to improve them. The primary focus is reproducing the text content and optimizing for searchability.

Thank You Dan, Bob & Chris, for your work and efforts. It will be appreciated and I look forward to reading the back issues.

Art

Kudos! thanks so much! Looks like I have some reading to do!

This is a tremendous undertaking and alot of work! It will also be a great resource for the philatelic community.

Thanks Dan, got it bookmarked.

You have surpassed expectations. Congradulations, job well done, thanks.

Art